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How Can PGS Help Prevent Recurrent Miscarriage?

By examining the chromosomes in an embyro using preimplantation genetic screening and only implanting healthy, normal embryos, doctors can reduce the miscarriage rate, explains Dr. Jamie Grifo, Program Director of the NYU Fertility Center and Director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology, NYU School of Medicine.

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(text on screen): Ask the Expert
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How can PGS help prevent recurrent miscarriage?
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Jamie Grifo, M.D., NYU Fertility Center: Well, the technique of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, slash, screening
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uses in vitro fertilization technology where we retrieve a good number of eggs, and then fertilize those, watch the embryos develop in the lab,
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and then, using very sophisticated methods, after you take a cell out of a Day 3 embryo, or a group of cells out of a blastocyst,
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you can do a genetic analysis of those cells, and thus have information about the embryo without harming the embryo.
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And what we find is that a large percentage of good-looking, healthy, viable embryos are aneuploid: They have abnormal numbers of chromosomes.
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And thus they either don't make pregnancies, or when they do make pregnancies, they're more likely to make miscarriages.
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Patients who have recurrent miscarriage, especially patients who have recurrent miscarriage due to aneuploidies (chromosomal abnormalities),
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when we apply this technique to them, and find embryos that are chromosomally normal,
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and now we have the ability to check all 23 chromosomes, we find the miscarriage rate is dramatically reduced in that patient.
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Typically, miscarriage rates in IVF are 20, 25 percent.
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When you do PGS and put back euploid embryos, the miscarriage rates are less than 7 percent.
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So, we can really help that group of patients not have to experience yet another devastating, bad outcome: miscarriage.
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Dr. Jamie Grifo Program Director of the NYU Fertility Center and Director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology at the NYU School of Medicine discusses how PGS can help prevent recurrent miscarriages.